They are both fascinated by breaking conventions – he breakdances and attracts thousands of followers on social media; she performs with a metal band. Jakub Józef Orliński and Aphrodite Patoulidou, apart from their extraordinary musical sensitivity, are characterized by questioning the divisions into what is light and what is serious. During the heyday of the Baroque style, Giovanni Battista Pergolesi presented a similar attitude. Therefore, it seems that the interpretation of his musical pieta, balancing on the edge of contemplation of the sacred and feverishness typical of the opera, performed by the singers and the Il Giardino d'Amore orchestra, which often collaborates with the Polish countertenor, will be an event that no music lover can miss.

“The greatest and most moving thing that has ever come from a composer’s pen,” wrote the leading Enlightenment critic and philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau about the duet opening the Stabat Mater. The work, completed by Pergolesi shortly before his death in 1736, later became the most widely printed stand-alone piece of the entire 18th century. The fame of the author was so great that even in the distant Scotland the composer’s name boosted the sale of prints that were falsely attributed to him by clever publishers. This is not surprising – anyone who hears Pergolesi’s treatment of the medieval sequence at least once will be moved by the intimacy of the depiction of the despair of the grieving mother.

This almost theatrical expression of Pergolesi’s work, which at least nominally belongs to the world of sacred music, will be an excellent introduction to the second part of the concert. It will focus on the operatic works of Antonio Vivaldi and George Frideric Handel. It is difficult to imagine the history of opera without the works of the latter. The artists will present, among others: two excerpts from the groundbreaking Rinaldo, which was the first opera Handel composed for London. Vivaldi is known mainly as the author of a dizzying number of instrumental concertos. Il Giardino d'Amore run by Stefan Plewniak will present two of them. Vivaldi’s operas,  more or less as numerous as those by Handel, although inferior to them in popularity, show him as an artist who perfectly understands the possibilities of the human voice and how to use it to achieve the best dramatic effect.